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At the end of the day, the "major" airlines are all in financial difficulties, asking for government concessions, defaulting on pension agreements, cutting workers' salaries, and giving poorer customer service

Ahem, major US airlines are staring extinction right in the face.

The same is not true for many major European and Asian airlines who all implement the practice of automatically cancelling your remaining flights if you are a 'no show' during your itinerary.

You've gotta use your coupons in the sequence they were purchased. Period. This is a standard IATA regulation.

AAFF and rkkwan may be able to answer this, but do non-IATA airlines (like Southwest, Jetblue etc) also implement this policy?

Are there exemptions for true emergencies? Say you were hospitalized but still made it to your end destination (train, bus, other flight etc...), then wanted to return home on your original itinerary - could you call the airline for some sort of expemtion?

I'm intrigued now, and I had no plans to do this, I just found the OP interesting... Trav

They will offer you a ticket change for a flat change fee plus any fare difference.

I will not make a general statement that an exemption is never possible, but I would not count on it at any time with restricted tickets.

You still have to remember that you are buying a restricted ticket and when you accepted these restrictions the airline sold you a much cheaper ticket then if you bought a unrestricted ticket. Regardless of what happens to you, it's your deal, not the airlines.

Ahem, I realize I'm a little late to this most interesting discussion, but in case anyone is still reading, I thought I'd offer my two cents to the most interesting pile of coins collected so far :

Airlines aren't the only vendors which impose conditions on their buyers as part of the contract. If you want to buy ketchup, for example, you might have a choice of sizes and flavours and brands, but you still have to buy ketchup from amongst the fixed quantities offered. Say you spy a bottle of 50 fluid ounce 'economy size' ketchup. As we all know, you aren't allowed to bring an empty container to the supermarket, open this 'giant economy size' bottle, dump half of it into your container, and then demand to buy the ketchup for half price, since "you're only buying half the amount." The price of the economy size is set on the understanding that the consumer will be bound to the conditions under which this economy size is marketed, and that is not 'by the fluid ounce' (or, in metric, by the ml) but as is, where is. This is exactly what the airlines are doing. They require that if you wish to buy a given product at the offered price, you must adhere to the conditions of sale. Whether or not you as buyer grasp the logic of the conditions is immaterial.

This is not to say that airlines are invariably reasonable in their demands, but as a general rule, take-it-or-leave-it' pricing is an efficient way of doing business that mutually benefits seller AND buyer. It's been proven to be so, whether we're talking airline tickets, ketchup, or many other things.

Hi Sue--I don't think your analogy quite works. What if there was a sale on ketchup that was a two-for-one deal. You buy two bottles for the price of one, and you have to take both of them. What's to prevent you from throwing one in the trash on the way out? When you have a two-segment flight, such as the one described above, although you are paying for it in a lump sum, you are not getting the service in a "single serving."

It looks to me as though somebody is planning to "take-it-AND-leave-it," and I for one don't see anything wrong with that.

It is kind of hard to argue that, for airlines at least, this is an efficient way of doing business.

If through no fault of your own (weather included) you miss your connection and the purpose of your trip is lost, you can decide to go right back home and then you are entitled to a full refund.

If through no fault of your own you miss your connection, you have business in the connecting city but the purpose of going to the final destination is missed, you are entitled to a refund of the portion of your fare beyond the connecting city (refund of all except twice the first coupon value) although you may still have to fly to the final destination city and back.

My analogy was meant to indicate that restrictions on what one can do or not do as a buyer aren't limited to air travel purchases. In any case, I'm sticking to my guns - if not my ketchup bottle - and maintain that that my point is still apt. When you buy a ticket, you enter into a contract. In this case, you have contracted to buy a flight from A to C, not a flight to B, even if the flight route takes you through B. To agree to one thing with the intention, from the outset, of doing another, I'm fairly certain would be termed a breach of contract. It's certainly an instance of bad faith, and bad faith generally leads to inefficiencies, even leaving aside the question of ethics.

How can it lead to inefficiencies? Unlike your analogy of the two ketchup bottles, in which one would conclude the contract (barring unforeseen problems) at the time of sale, air travel involves conclusion of contract at a time somewhat after the time of sale. Also, airlines aren't really contracting to fly one a certain number of miles but to transport one to a specific destination by air. Thus, they retain the right to alter your routing, even at the last minute, say on another plane/flight or even on another airline entirely. They need this flexibility to run the airline efficiently.

I've been re-routed on a couple of occasions. Since I intended to go from A to C and return, no problem. However, consider what could have happened if I had wished to go to B or worse yet, had wished to return from B to A on the assumption that the plane would 'call' for me on the way back from C to A. If a re-route occurred on the return flight, i.e. C to A, I would have found myself stranded.

Consider, too, the reverse situation. If I contract to go from A to C, I am not going to be happy if the airline flies me to B, and then tells me - in the absence of any compelling reason (weather, whatever) that I'll have to stay in B for a couple of days until they take me onward to C. I'm not going to accept that the sum of those two parts is equal to the whole for which I contracted. Thus, I shouldn't expect the airline to accept that idea, either.

It gets even more complicated for air travel since, as rkkwan and others have explained much better (and certainly more concisely) than I have, airlines often must contract with numerous other parties in order to offer a particular service.